Lucerne / TURNERABEND / representing Canada :)

Lucerne
On November 5th, my friend from Mexico, Ana, had her cousin that's staying in Belgium for a one year exchange, came to Switzerland!! Ana and I showed her around Basel and I realized how much has changed!! It was only three months ago that I arrived here and had the same facial expression as her, as I walked around Basel. In 3 months I have learned so much and become used to the way it is here, so it was nice to see the excitement in her eyes as she saw how beautiful Basel is! It was a good eye opener to show me how truly lucky I am to be here. On November 6th, I went to Lucerne with Ana, her host mom Monika, and Ana's cousin Sophia. We started the day off by going to a glass blowing factory / museum. We learned the history of glass which is actually fascinating, I thought it was something so simple but it goes back thousands of years and has been used for SO many different purposes throughout the years. I never really thought about it before, so it was so cool to see the history of it and different things you can do with glass. They had different places set up to show you the different mysteries of glass - making noise with the wine glasses, making water vibrate through sound going through glass, seeing better with different forms of glass, it was really neat !! We also walked through a glass maze, it was scary at times because I kept walking into the glass everywhere, it was hilarious!

Then Monika took us to the Pilatus Mountains. It was INCREDIBLE !! We took the steepest train in the world to the top of the Pilatus Mountain, 2100 meters above sea level. On one side we were completely surrounded by snowy mountains that were breathtaking, and on the other side when we looked down we could see the beautiful city Lucerne..

Turnerabend
This past weekend was an amazing weekend.  For the past two months or so, the sport hall (There's a sport hall in my village that I attend and have met so many amazing people through!!) that I attend every Wednesday has been preparing for the famous 'Buus Turnerabend.' The theme this year was "Das Supertalent" and each club that goes to the Sport Hall creates a dance, just like you'd see on America's got talent. The club that I'm apart of is called Dominrigue Buus, which has women ages 17 - 30. We split our dance into 3 parts: ballet, stomp(Creating a cool rhythm using street stuff like garbage cans, basketballs, plastic bags etc) and aerobic. Each person did either stomp or ballet, then we all did aerobic together. So much work was put into the show put on Friday and Saturday night.. All the clubs worked very hard on their piece, and everyone worked very hard to make the place look amazing with decorations. It looked fabulous!! Afterwards there was a big party on both nights, most people stayed until the wee hours in the morning both nights, I met a lot of people and talked with people that I haven't had a chance to talk to before. I get a video in the Spring of our show, so I can upload pictures and videos then I hope!

The event is really important to raise money to go towards new things for the Sport Hall to keep it going which is why everyone works so hard to make sure it's perfect. So both Friday and Saturday night we served dinner, sold cakes, sold drinks at a bar, and put on a great show, it was the perfect weekend!!

Representing Canada :) 

After that Turnerabend weekend, I was clearly exhausted but being an exchange student you learn to just forget about how tired you are and continue to take every possible opportunity. I received an email inviting me to attend a Rotary event, that they selected 4 of the 30 Canadians to attend to represent their country to future exchange students. It was a country fair I guess you could say! There was a big room with tables set up, with exchange students that are all representing their own country. Future exchange students walked around and we tried our best to explain everything about our country.. It was hard to explain Canada since it's massive and each place is so different from the next !! So, we all stuck to explaining where we came from since we were from parts all across Canada, which made it easier for them to understand. We tried our best to answer their questions, some were pretty tough but I enjoyed them! One was "Why should I choose Canada and not the USA?" It was a great question, and brave of them to ask .. so I tried my hardest to answer it honestly and fairly - Canada rocks !! Just kidding, I went into a little more depth :) It was very difficult though because USA is also a sweet place !

I really enjoyed remembering how exciting that stage of the exchange was! I didn't get to pick my country, but  I still remember the anticipation of what country I was going to get.. It was scary but SO exciting!!